Pundonor. Many languages have cultivated special meanings for the word honor, and nations using those languages have developed particular connotations for this word. I think one would agree that in France, with its tradition of dueling, the concept of honor has had a rather more delicate definition than in America. In imperial Germany, where the dishonored infantry officer was left with a revolver as the only solution for having transgressed the code, the definition was also specialized, and no other nation has been able to enforce the strict interpretations that England observes regarding a businessman's word of honor. In Japan a whole culture, the samurai's, grew around this word. However, in other countries in which I have lived but had better not name, none of the above concepts has any currency, and in the United States we have been rather more lax in our application than Germany and France and markedly more lax than England and Japan. But it has been left to Spain to cultivate not only the world's most austere definition of honor but also to invent a special word to cover that definition. Of course, Spanish has the word honor, which means roughly what it does in French, but also the word pundonor, which is a contraction of punta de honor (point of honor). At any rate, it is not sufficient for a meticulous Spaniard to worry about his honor. Many things that an American man can in all decency forgive, the Spaniard cannot. If he is a man of pundonor, he must take action against insult. A young man with four unmarried sisters had better cultivate a nice sense of pundonor. A politican, a businessman engaged in intricate dealings, a stage idiot and above all a bullfighter must be studious of their pundonor, and in this book, where I deal with several men noted for their pundonor, I shall make use of this unique Spanish word, for I have found that whenever I am perplexed about what a Spaniard might do under certain circumstances, or the nation as a whole for that matter, it is instructive to ask, 'Under these circumstances what would a man do who subscribed to an acute or even a preposterous sense of honor?' And from endeavoring to answer this question I often find clues as to what the Spaniard will do. After all, Don Quixote is an engaging study of Spanish traits not only because it lampoons the concept of pundonor but because it demonstrates that no man even possessed pundonor to a greater degree than the doleful knight.


James A. Michener, Iberia. 1968. Random House. 71-72